Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 24 August 2024 — 2000 words
The latest fad in all kinds of activism to attack one’s ideological opponents via “fact checking”. We see this in politics and all the modern controversies, including, of course, Climate Science.
Almost none of the “fact checking sites” and “fact checking organizations” actually check facts. And, if they accidentally find themselves checking what we would all agree is a fact, and not just an opinion or point of view, invariably it is checked against a contrary opinion, a different point of view or an alternative fact. The resulting fact check report depends on the purposes of the fact check. Some are done to confirm that “our guy” or “our team” is proved to be correct, or that the opposition is proved to be wrong, lying or misinformation. When a fact is found to be different in any way from the desired fact, even the tiniest way, the original being checked is labelled a falsehood, or worse, an intentional lie. (or conversely, other people are lying about our fact!). Nobody likes a liar, so this sort of fake fact checking accomplishes two goals – it casts doubt on the not-favored fact supposedly being checked and smears an ideological opponent as a liar. One stone – two birds.
While not entirely new on the fact-checking scene, an AI-enhanced effort has popped to the surface of the roiling seas of controversy: Logically Facts. “Logically Facts is part of Meta’s Third Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFC) and works with TikTok in Europe. We have been a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) since 2020 and are a member of the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) in India and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) in Europe.” [ source ] Meta? “Meta Platforms…is the undisputed leader in social media. The technology company owns three of the four biggest platforms by monthly active users (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram).” “Meta’s social networks are known as its Family of Apps (FoA). As of the fourth quarter of 2023, they attracted almost four billion users per month.” And TikTok? It has over a billion users.
I’m doubtful that one can add up the 4 billion and the 1 billion to make 5 billion users of META and TikTok combined, but in any case, that’s a huge percentage of humanity any way one looks at it.
And who is providing fact-checking to those billion of people? Logically Facts [LF].
And what kind of fact-checking does LF do? Let’s look at an example that will deal with something very familiar with readers here: Climate Science Denial.
The definition put forward by the Wiki is:
“Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change.”
Other popular definitions of climate change denial include: attacks on solutions, questioning official climate change science and/or the climate movement itself.
If I had all the time left to me in this world, I could do a deep, deep dive into the Fact-Checking Industry. But, being limited, let’s look, together, at one single “analysis” article from Logically Facts:
‘Pseudoscience, no crisis’: How fake experts are fueling climate change denial
This article is a fascinating study in ‘fake-fact-checking by inuendo‘. As we go through the article, sampling its claims, I’ll alert you to any check of an actual fact – don’t hold your breath. If you wish to be pro-active, read the LF piece first, and you’ll have a better handle on what they are doing.
The lede in their piece is this:
“Would you seek dental advice from an ophthalmologist? The answer is obvious. Yet, on social media, self-proclaimed ‘experts’ with little to no relevant knowledge of climate science are influencing public opinion.”
The two editors of this “analysis” are listed as Shreyashi Roy [MA in Mass Communications and a BA in English Literature] and Nitish Rampal [ … based out of New Delhi and has …. a keen interest in sports, politics, and tech.] The author is said to be [more on “said to be” in a minute…] Anurag Baruah [MA in English Language and a certificate in Environmental Journalism: Storytelling earned online from the Thompson Founation.]
Why do you say “said to be”, Mr. Hansen? If you had read the LF piece, as I suggested, you would see that it reads as if it was “written” by an AI Large Language Model, followed by editing for sense and sensibility by a human, probably, Mr. Baruah, followed by further editing by Roy and Rampal.
The lede is itself an illogic. First it speaks of medical/dental advice, pointing out, quite rightly, that they are different specializations. But then complains that unnamed so-called self-proclaimed experts who LF claims “have little to no relevant knowledge of climate science” are influencing public opinion. Since these persons are so-far unnamed, LF’s AI, author and subsequent editors could not possibly know what their level of knowledge about climate science might be.
Who exactly are they smearing here?
The first is:
“One such ‘expert,’ Steve Milloy, a prominent voice on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), described a NASA Climate post (archive) about the impact of climate change on our seas as a “lie” on June 26, 2024.”
It is absolutely true that Milloy, who is well-known to be an “in-your-face” and “slightly over the-top” critic of all things science that he considers poorly done, being over-hyped, or otherwise falling into his category of “Junk Science”, posted on X the item claimed. LF , its AI, author and editors make no effort to check what fact/facts Milloy was calling a lie, or to check NASA’s facts in any way whatever.
You see, Milloy calling any claim from NASA “a lie” would be an a priori case of Climate Denial: he is refuting or refusing to accept some point of official climate science.
Who is Steve Milloy?
Steve Milloy is a Board Member & Senior Policy Fellow of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, author of seven books and over 600 articles/columns published in major newspapers, magazines and internet outlets. He has testified by request before the U.S. Congress many times, including on risk assessment and Superfund issues. He is an Adjunct Fellow of the National Center for Public Policy Research.
“He holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; Master of Health Sciences (Biostatistics), Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health; Juris Doctorate, University of Baltimore; and Master of Laws (Securities regulation) from the Georgetown University Law Center.”
It seems that many consider Mr. Milloy to be an expert in many things.
And the evidence for LF’s dismissal of Milloy as a “self-proclaimed expert” having “little to no relevant knowledge of climate science”? The Guardian, co-founder of the climate crisis propaganda outfit Covering Climate Now, said “JunkScience.com, has been called “the main entrepôt for almost every kind of climate-change denial”” and after a link listing Milloy’s degrees, pooh-poohed him for “lacking formal training in climate science.” Well, a BA in Natural Sciences might count for something. And a law degree is not nothing. The last link gives clear evidence that Milloy is a well-recognized expert and it is obvious that the LF AI, author, and editors either did not read the contents of the link or simply chose to ignore it.
Incredibly, LF’s next target is “… John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that no climate crisis exists and that climate science is “pseudoscience.” Clauser’s Nobel Prize lent weight to his statements, but he has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change.“
LF’s evidence against Clauser is The Washington Post in an article attacking not just Clauser, but a long list of major physicists who do not support the IPCC consensus on climate change: Willie Soon (including the lie that Soon’s work was financed by fossil fuel companies) , Steve Koonin, Dick Lindzen and Will Happer. The Post article fails to discuss any of the reasons these esteemed, world-class physicists are not consensus-supporting club members. Their non-conforming is their crime. No facts are checked.
LF reinforces the attack on world-renown physicists with a quote from Professor Bill McGuire: “Such fake experts are dangerous and, in my opinion, incredibly irresponsible—Nobel Prize or not. A physicist denying anthropogenic climate change is actually denying the well-established physical properties of carbon dioxide, which is simply absurd.”
McGuire, is not a physicist and is not a climate scientist, but has a PhD in Geology and is a volcanologist and an IPCC contributor. He also could be seen as “lacking formal training in climate science.”
But, McGuire has a point, which LF, its AI and its human editors seem to miss, the very basis of the CO2 Global Warming hypothesis is based on physics, not based on what is today called “climate science”. Thus, the physicists are the true experts . (and not the volcanologists….)
LF then launches into the gratuitous comparison of “fake experts” in the anti-tobacco fight, alludes to oil industry ties, and then snaps right to John Cook.
John Cook, a world leader in attacking Climate Change Denial, is not a climate scientist. He is not a geologist, not an atmospheric scientist, not an oceanic scientist, not a physicist, not even a volcanologist. He “earned his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Western Australia in 2016”.
The rest of the Logically Facts fake-analysis is basically a re-writing of some of Cook’s anti-Climate Denialists screeds. Maybe/probably resulting from an AI large language model trained on pro-consensus climate materials. Logically Facts is specifically and openly an AI-based effort.
LF proceeds to attack a series of persons, not their ideas, one after another: Tony Heller, Dr. Judith Curry, Patrick Moore and Bjørn Lomborg.
The expertise of these individuals in their respective fields are either ignored or brushed over.
Curry is a world renown climate scientist, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry is the author of the book on Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, another book on Thermodynamics, Kinetics, and Microphysics of Clouds, and the marvelous groundbreaking Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response. Google scholar returns over 10,000 references to a search of “Dr. Judith Curry climate”.
Lomborg is a socio-economist with an impressive record, a best selling author and a leading expert on issues of energy dependence, value for money spent on international anti-poverty and public health efforts, etc. Richard Tol, is mention negatively for daring to doubt the “97% consensus”, with no mention of his qualifications as a Professor of Economics and a Professor of the Economics of Climate Change.
Bottom Line:
Logically Facts is a Large Language Model-type AI, supplemented by writers and editors meant to clean-up the mess returned by this chat-bot type AI. Thus, it is entirely incapable of making any value judgements between repeated slander, enforced consensus views, the prevailing biases of scientific fields and actual facts. Further, any LLM-based AI is incapable of Critical Thinking and drawing logical conclusions.
In short, Logically Facts is Illogical.
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Author’s Comment:
I am not a fan of Artificial Intelligence (an oxymoron). Logically Facts and the rest of the Logically empire, Logically.ai, suffer from all of the major flaws in current versions of various types of AIs, including hallucination, break-down and the AI-version of “you are what you eat”.
As I understand it, Logically Facts uses a LLM that is trained to trust official sources (governments), newspapers of record (such as the The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, etc) and academics quoted in those sources and discount any source that does not agree with the opinions of those sources.
The problem is immediately apparent: in any sort of controversy, the most “official” and widespread view wins and is declared “true” and contrary views are declared “misinformation” or “disinformation”. Individuals representing the minority view are labelled “deniers” (of whatever) and all slander and libel against them is rated “true” by default.
That is the natural outcome of LLMs – that effect is magnified by tweaking their training algorithms to accept certain sources and types of sources as definitive and other sources and types of sources as untrustworthy.
An AI-chat-bot can answer easy, non-controversial factual questions correctly – and are a quick, down-and-dirty method of find out things like: “What is the capital city of Turkey?” (as long as you don’t want to fight about the history….). “What’s the population of New York City?” (but be careful, make sure that is what you want to know, and not the population of what we think of as “NY City” including all the boroughs and surrounding areas – The NY-NJ-Connecticut megalopolis).
Logically Facts does not check facts.
Thanks for reading.
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Very good Kip, well done. I can’t see AI as anything other than an internet search with the same pitfalls and limitations. AI would seem to be more specialized to the ideas of its creators. I don’t trust the internet and I won’t trust AI.
Bob ==> You are quite right to not trust AI with anything important. Logically Facts’ AI is a bit more sophisticated, but prone to all the faults of every LLM.
Quite right. If you concede that an “AI” is intelligent you already quit thinking.
Please, please, please: refuse to be enchanted by mere fluency. A stream of well-crafted words is not compelling. Look for understanding. Look for reasoning. Look for a network of conjectures that lead to testable claims. Look for the outcome of those tests. Look for failures of attempted falsification.
Just stitching together a load of bafflegab is just artificial bullshit.
“Bafflegab” – a new word to me but instantly understandable. Excellent!
Large Language Models are biased in the same way as Wikipedia, by restricting which sources the training documents consider trustworthy.
With political reporting, The New York Times is considered reliable, while The Federalist is not.This is not like comparing The Daily Beast to The Gateway Pundit.
Tom ==> Yes, you are correct — the training issue is what allows Logically Facts to return nothing but climate crisis propaganda.
KH, very nice post. Let me add some additional aside color (colour for those in the UK). We both speak English, but it is diverging rather rapidly. Car hood=bonnet. Truck=lorry. Gas=petrol. Illegal aliens=migrants.
‘Logically facts’ AI does not check real facts. Of course not, because if it did it’s climate science consensus ‘facts’ would be in a shambles in an AI minute.
Let’s check some climate science consensus ‘logically facts’ against provable reality using my actual I and googlefu, not some AI trained on biased data sets.
Rud ==> Impressive huh? Logically Facts uses 1600 words and doesn’t check a single fact of any kind1
There are two problems with predictions:
(1) They are not science because they are not based on data
AND
(2) Almost every long term prediction, on every subject, is wrong … but a lot of people love scary predictions and believe them. They probably like science fiction movies too.
There are even “deniers” of what the IPCC said –
“predictions of future climate states are not possible in a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system”.
Ah, but AI ignores what AR3 WG1 correctly said. Did not happen.
Yeah, it’s almost –
“what happens in Geneva, stays in Geneva”
“Making predictions is hard! Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra(?)
My wife, sons and I visited Glacier NP a couple of months ago. First stop was a boat cruise where the boat’s captain stated that the “Glacier” in Glacier National Park referred to the landscape being shaped by glaciers and not the presence of glaciers.
In a similar note, the brochure for Glacier Bay National Park stated that what is now open water was dry land 400 years ago and that the glaciers reached their maximum extent ca 1800AD.
…and those are facts!
“We both speak English, but it is diverging rather rapidly.”
Lost in the Pond
https://www.youtube.com/@LostinthePond/videos
My favorite fact check was my google search for Fauci’s trashing of masking in March 2020 on TV’s 60 Minutes. One of my results was a fact check saying “there was new science”
RFK Jnr’s book “The Real Dr. Fauci” is very instructive.
It is replete with references and citations (which account for about half the pages in the book).
The much-relied-upon medical journal Cochrane has also consistently debunked the efficacy of over-the-counter masks preventing spread and acquisition of COVID-type viruses.
https://www.cochrane.org/
But Fauci knew better.
Apparently.
Fun factoids. We (Fauci) knew since many decades of ‘science’ that masks are ineffective against aerosolized influenza. At the beginning of COVID19, it was thought it was not aerosolized, rather a droplet aspirate. But after 6 months, the facts were clear that it was at least partly aerosolized— so via long known science masks would be ineffective. The analogy is that a tight mesh chain link fence might stop a rat, but not a mosquito.
Fauci knew that within the year, yet persisted in the opposite for years.
.
Well –
“ya gotta dance with who brung ya”
I suspect the motivation for that was that the Biden administration wanted to give the appearance of being on top of the situation and actively engaged in suppressing the pandemic.
Is impersonating a fact checker a felony?
Yes. It is fraud. And is richly rewarded one way or another with taxpayer money.
The correct answer to all physical interactions occurring in the Universe is unknown.
We have a severe shortage of functions describing them.
That makes “fact checking” impossible as any competent defender of the scientific method will tell you.
As Richard Lindzen has said, the problem is scientific illiteracy. Most people I talk to are dumbfounded learn that H20 is the most powerful greenhouse gas, have never heard of the Beer Lambert law.
And how does the”greenhouse” analogy get past the fact checkers? Isn’t this misinformation?
Fact chokers, not fact checkers
There is a consensus that has existed for the past 127 years, but it is not the IPCC consensus
That consensus is that there is a greenhouse effect and manmade CO2 emissions add to it. In 27 years of climate reading I have never found a scientists or writer who denies that consensus. There are a few scientists who claim manmade CO2 has a very small effect because 97% of CO2 is natural . That’s what some Nutters here believe. And other Nutters believe AGW does not exist.
There is no consensus on how much CO2 affects the climate in 100 to 200 years or whether the effects are likely to be good news or bad news.
A few of the scientists mentioned here have made claims not backed by reliable data or failed to support their claims with facts and logic:
Soon makes false claims by cherry picking sunspot counts that are incompetent proxies for TSI
Clauser is quoted in Climate The Movie falsely claimed “there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change.” That’s the sort of nonsense the AGW deniers post here!
Curry claims manmade CO2 emissions are a problem that must be solved, but refuses to define what she means by “problem”
Happer and Lindzn make conservative guesses about the long term effects of CO2 x 2 that are educated guesses, just like everyone else. But they never make false claims that can be fact checked like Soon and Clauser have done. Curry seems to be taking a bizarre position where she refuses to define WHY she thinks manmade CO2 emissions are a problem.
Two things even skeptic scientists ON OUR SIDE fail to do:
(1) Discuss whether the past 48 years of global warming was bad news or good news
AND
(2) Admit that no one knows the climate in 100 to 200 years .. educated guesses, even their own, are not science.
“Discuss whether the past 48 years of global warming was bad news or good news”
In order to discuss “global warming” you have to define what it is! Since it is based upon daily “mid-range” temperatures with more and more averaging, every piece of data that is required in order to have a legitimate discussion is obscured. Daily mid-range temps tell you *nothing* about what is happening with climate. Las Vegas and Miami can have exactly the same mid-range temp with vastly different climates. How then can you discuss “global warming” when looking at just the mid-range temps?
“Admit that no one knows the climate in 100 to 200 years .. educated guesses, even their own, are not science.”
Again, define climate first. It’s not possible to do so with the metric climate science is using today. The typical prediction from that metric is based upon the Earth turning into a firepit – melting glaciers, rising sea level, dying species, widespread harvest failures, mass starvation, mass relocation of humanity, and on and on and on and on ….. ad infinitum. Yet the metric itself doesn’t support that assumption, it CAN’T support it because the data needed to support it is gone, hidden behind averages that are meaningless for actually defining “climate”.
Numbers are not needed.
People have first hand experience with the changing climate over the past 50 years.
Billions of people
Some have live in the same area for many decades.
47 years for me.
The change in the climate here is much warmer winters and much less snow. We don’t need a Ph.D. scientists or an average local temperature to tell us that. We know that snow shoveling averaged about once a week in the late 1970s, but last winter was ten minutes, one time, for the whole winter. Similar to the prior winter.
You are trying to conflate weather and climate. They aren’t the same. What you experienced in the 70’s has no bearing on what is happening today or will happen tomorrow.
I’ll ask you again to define what you mean by climate. Don’t keep evading.
I can give you numbers on continual record harvests of grain every year, longer growing seasons, greening of the Earth, and fewer major storms, These do far more to define climate than does some opinion abut “the 70’s were colder”.
As Freeman Dyson said years ago, the major problem with climate science is that it is *not* holistic and its not even close to being holistic.
Humans have lived north of the Arctic Circle and along the equator for millenia. The temperature range is huge. Yet the *climate* in both places have been conducive to human survival – perhaps with different adaptations but long term survivable nonetheless.
So, for the third time, define what you mean by climate. Climate science can’t do it. Can you?
RG engages in ‘qualitative science’ only.
“Some have live in the same area for many decades.
47 years for me.”
I’ve lived in the same town in the UK all my life ((66years) and all that I’ve noticed is that this summer the countryside seems a lot greener. Other than that this August is cooler and more windy than last year. Also, because it’s rural around where I live, my area has never been mentioned as “the hottest place in England today…” on the BBC weather forecast. Next might be warmer or it could be cooler, who knows? Certainly not BBC weather.
Trump and Harris speeches both need a lot of fact checking.
Harris doesn’t have original thoughts.
Harris makes false statements about what Trump has said and done and false claims about what Trump would do as President.
Trump makes false claims about how great he was as President and how he will fix every Biden/Harris problem on day one
If there is ever a debate, it will not be like Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. It will be like Dumb and Dumber in 2024.
I agree- and will actually watch the debates for the first time in decades. And the VP debates too.
I’m expecting SNL will have a field day after the debates.
Watching a Trump/Harris debate is no different from watching little kids on the playground arguing about basketball fouls.
Fair enough- but I’m sure Trump will win the debate by brow beating Harris. He is a bully and sometimes that’s a good characteristic in a president.
Yes.
And everybody has an opinion.
They’re just like butts.
Everyone has one, but nobody’s is “perfect”.
Yeah. Some are better than others in both instances.
They’re politicians, so what do you expect???
Mature behavior discussing policy positions?
As Vice President Kamala Harris insisted that America “must move forward, and not go backwards”.
Now she’s running for President she has now added more detail in that “America should move forward into the future and not go backwards into the past”. I’m sure a clarification like that will floor any doubter.
On another forum (a newspaper in the UK), I mentioned John Clauser’s comments and was vilified by other commenters along the lines of “He’s a quantum physicist, what would he know about climate?” You can’t point out that physics is the basis of “climate science”.
Most of these commenters think that ‘Climate Science’ is an entity in itself and don’t seem to realise that it’s an amalgam of the real sciences.
and you have to be a genius to get a Noble for quantum physics- so anything he says is worth listening to
AI can tell lies if the programmer has coded it to do so, including the instruction to repeat an archived lie. Truth is a quality no logic machine can ever be given – by anyone.
It should never amaze anyone when one publicly exposed liar tells you how another liar has been and is lying to you for they absolutely know how it is done with the experience they already have.
Mann was exposed as a liar in real time by Judith Curry.and captured on video doing so and yet he is the alarmist’s go to scientist and Curry is continually lied about by him.. So much for the proponents of climate alarm who do know better but like money and celebrity too much..
There is only one truth about global warming and currently that is that no human being has ever explained how and why it is happening with any convincing proof whatsoever. And the current fake tales about carbon dioxide tell you just how desperate alarmists are getting.
Unfortunately in our green and once-pleasant land, there is a harsher punishment for not toeing the party line than there is for not telling the truth. Until that changes, the greenshirts will continue their march toward dystopia.
I checked the latest Steve Milloy video where he claims US has had no warming since 1970.
Milloy is a fool who deserves the criticism he gets. Now I remember hy I stoppe reading hs website a few years ago.
Here in Michigan our winters are much warmer than in the 1970s and have FAR less snow. This is true of many US states. The
NOAA’s USCRN reflects +0.34 degrees C. US warming per decade since 2005.
UAH USA46 reflects US warming tpp
Fools like Milloy give conservatives a bad name.
This article spends far too much time talking about the qualifications of various scientists and writers … rather than what they have said or written that may be controversial or false. That’s why it was rejected for my blog’s daily recommended reading list this morning:
The Honest Climate Science and Energy Blog: The August 24, 2024 Reading List
You are far too angry for me to go to your website.
I challenge you to find a better daily list of recommended articles on climate and energy anywhere on the internet. Including what I consider to be the best articles here.
My own writing is under 1% of the content.
Actually, Milloy’s claims are about the data used by NOAA and their manipulation of it. None of the data available, including those you offer are suited to making the comparison in question, and dismissing Milloy in such a simplistic manner is hardly an impressive argument. I certainly will not be treating your sifting with any particular enthusiasm.
“Here in Michigan our winters are much warmer than in the 1970s and have FAR less snow.”
True, but we don’t know if winters will remain that way. So we can’t say it’s climate change- rather than climate variability, the extent of which is not well known.
In the ’70s, I did a great deal of snowshoeing- not much in recent years.
Climate science can’t even tell us *what* is changing with climate. Ag science is decades ahead of climate science in doing so.
Click-bait alert.
All two decades? That is still weather, not long-term climate.
‘refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change.’
Nothing wrong with refusing to acknowledge, disputing or fighting things that are wrong, just because a bunch of intellectually lazy dimwits decide to agree with each other.
On that basis, anyone who stood up for black people in the 1930s was a ‘white superiority denier’: answer that charge, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama etc etc.
Albert Einstein was a denier of physics in 1905: strange that he won a Nobel Prize within a few years, isn’t it?
Winston Churchill was a cretin for refusing to support appeasement of Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s. How did that play out in history?
I’m not convinced that pro-Netanyahu slaves will be on the right side of history, despite those who hold Israeli Jews to account for mass murder being smeared as being ‘anti-semitic’.
Nor am I convinced that Zelensky will be described in 2100 as anything but a ‘trumped up, self-serving corrupt thief’, nor am I convinced that those who wished to eliminate the Russian language and culture from Eastern Ukraine will be feted as enlightened souls either.
History has already rebuked Colin Powell for lying about weapons of mass destruction and US power as a result is diminishing by the decade. All of us who called out the cobblers back in the day were discriminated against, vilified and called ‘Saddam appeasers’ or the like. No, we weren’t: we happened to believe that ordinary Iraqis had the right to human life, unlike the usual bunch of yobs, thugs and genocidal psychopaths who take such appalling decisions on behalf of 330 million people.
As for ‘AI’ being an unemotional arbiter: has AI yet gained the capability to discriminate between ‘popular views’ and ‘objective truth’? I have my doubts……
I find it somewhat ironic that the article keeps referring to analyses by John Cook, as if he’s a climate expert.
Fact checking is simply peer review on steroids aided by computer programing. Peer review determines which lies to print and what truth to suppress and then “Fact Checkers” report out those sources of lies and suppression. I am reminded of that 80’s make-up commercial with an exponentially increasing myriad of women’s faces repeating “and she told her friends and so on and so on…”
The thing i am still trying to puzzle out is, why academicians have decided that the post-modernist hill they intend to die on is this gender spectrum insanity. Peer review and fact checking are marching down that road to hoist themselves on their own petard.
Would you seek dental advice from an ophthalmologist?
How many times have I heard that evasion of logic? Conflating expertise and expert opinion is a particularly lazy argument in the fallacy realm of argumentum ad verecundiam. I tend to fall back on Richard Feynman by way of response, i.e. “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Nice work, Kip!
There’s a lot more mysteries in this cosmos than facts- so fact checking is a stupid waste of time and resources and it’s just a lame tool of lefty politics.
“An AI-chat-bot can answer easy, non-controversial factual questions correctly “
Not in my experience. I asked two different “AIs” (ChatGPT, Claude2) the same non-controversial, historical question, and they both gave very similar wrong answers.
I ran across the following Snopes report today; I was actually surprised they published this:
https://news.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-trump-didnt-people-020000822.html
That is surprising, and a ray of hope. Have they debunked the “Fine People” hoax yet?
“Nitish Rampal [ … based out of New Delhi”
Since the entire rest of the universe is outside New Delhi, it might be more helpful to tell us where he is based in.
Bjorn Lomborg makes the point that “climate science” is a hodgepodge of different disciplines and that practitioners rarely have mastery of more than one of these (many don’t have even that). So climate scientists have no real way of evaluating the statements made in their field by specialists (or not) in one of the disciplines they have no knowledge of at all. Thus ‘consensus’ has no real meaning, and the fact that they give credit to the invalid ‘98% agree’ research by UQ – which I used as an example of what NOT to do when teaching doctoral candidates research methods – is a classic example of what Lomborg is getting at.
I am a statistician (psychometric/ bio stats) where there is very strong emphasis on the extent of measurement uncertainty, and strategies for reducing this. My PhD was on decision-making in corporations. Measurement uncertainty is huge in climate science where virtually all the variables are derived from very poor proxies and unsystematic measures (eg terrestrial temperatures which essentially come predominantly from Northern Hemisphere cities – subject to heat island effects). I can’t engage in discussions with climate scientists because they assume and indeed fervently believe their measures are accurate to 1/100th of a degree and think (wrongly) that averaging measurement error reduces it (it doesn’t). I’m sure physicists, meteorologists, geologists all hit the same problem of belief replacing mastery when it is not the climate scientist’s original discipline.
Another example – something I know as a statistician – is that if you tailor your model to the sample it was gathered from (ie tune it to match, say the past) it will have zilch chance of accurately predicting in other samples (say, the future) – yet climate scientists (often originally physicists and certainly not statisticians) create highly tuned multi variate models that fail to meet a range of basic statistical requirements for effective prediction.
So I believe Lomborg is on the right track, and agree these ‘fact checks’ are merely manipulative exercises.
“Measurement uncertainty is huge in climate science where virtually all the variables are derived from very poor proxies and unsystematic measures”
So-called climate “scientists” get around this by assuming that all measurement uncertainty is random, Gaussian, and cancels. Leaving sampling uncertainty (i.e. the standard deviation of the the sample means) as the only measurement uncertainty element. They don’t understand that they are caught in a catch-22 situation. If they assume that their sample size is in the thousands then they only have one sample and must assume that it properly represents the parent distribution – but they have no idea of what the sample distribution actually is because they never bother to look at variance, kurtosis, or skewness. If they assume that they have many samples then their sample size becomes 1 (one) and their sampling uncertainty is actually the standard deviation of their sample – which is far larger than in the milli-kelvins.
“ they assume and indeed fervently believe their measures are accurate to 1/100th of a degree and think (wrongly) that averaging measurement error reduces it (it doesn’t).”
Again, they assume that all measurement uncertainty is random, Gaussian, and cancels. This can actually only happen if they are measuring the same thing multiple times using the same instrument over a short period of time. The temperatures taken globally simply don’t meet this requirement, not even the satellite measurements.
They then assume that “anomalies” don’t inherit the measurement uncertainty of the average used to calculate the anomaly plus the measurement uncertainty of the actual temperature measurement that is the other element of the anomaly calculation. They don’t even weight the anomalies they calculate based on the variances of the components, e.g. the variance of cold temps in one hemisphere and the warm temps in the other hemisphere are *not* the same.
I wouldn’t trust *any* of these so-called climate “scientists” in a machine shop making bushings for a critical component. They would assume that how precisely they could calculate the average size of the bushings is the measurement uncertainty instead of the standard deviation of the actual measurements.
Well done, Kip. Thanks as always.
w.